The US has one of the highest fire death rates in the industrialised world, with more than 2 million fires reported each year.

The sun is 330,330 times larger than the earth.

The largest iceberg ever recorded was 335km (208 miles) long and 97km (60 miles) wide.

Luke Howard used Latin words to categorize clouds in 1803.

Hurricanes, tornadoes and bigger bodies of water always go clockwise in the Southern Hemisphere and counterclockwise in the Northern Hemisphere. This directional spinning has to do with the rotation of the earth and is called the Coriolis force.

Winds that blow toward the equator curve west.

Organist William Herschel discovered the planet Uranus in 1781 with the first reflecting telescope that he built. He named it Georgium Sidium in honour of King George III of England but in 1850 it was renamed Uranus in accordance with the tradition of naming planets for Roman gods.

Planets, meaning wanderers, are named after Roman deities: Mercury, messenger of the gods; Venus, the god of love and beauty; Mars, the god of war; Jupiter, king of the gods; and Saturn, father of Jupiter and god of agriculture; Neptune, god of the sea.

During a total solar eclipse the temperature can drop by 6 degrees Celsius (about 20 degrees Fahrenheit).

The tallest waterfalls in the world are Angel Falls in Venezuela. At 979 m (3,212 ft), they are 19 times taller than the Niagara Falls, or 3 times taller than the Empire State Building.

Although the Angel Falls are much taller than the Niagara Falls, the latter are much wider, and they both pour about the same amount of water over their edges – about 2,8 billion litres (748 million gallons) per second.

There are 1040 islands around Britain, one of which is the smallest island in the world: Bishop’s Rock.

All the planets in the solar system rotate anticlockwise, except Venus. It is the only planet that rotates clockwise.

Earth is the densest planet in the solar system and the only one not named after a god.

Earth orbits the sun at an average speed of 29.79 km/s (18.51 miles/sec), or about 107 000 km/h (about 67,000 miles/hour).

One year on earth is 365.26 days long. One day is 23 hours, 56 minutes, and 4 seconds long. The extra day in a leap year was introduced to compensate for the discrepancy in the Georgian calendar.

Plates carrying the continents migrate over the earth’s surface a few centimetres (inches) per year, about the same speed that a fingernail grows.